Verify.

Then trust until back stabbed and sold out.

Copyright should expire after 50 years after creation or death, whichever happens later. Period.

We'd all be a lot richer for it.

Google is the ultimate gadfly...attaching itself to everything worthwhile, so it can get some part of the fame...without every creating anything itself.

Please explain the benefit of paying people for things several decades after their deaths. Seriously now, why shouldn't the economy benefit from the use of works by long-dead artists?

My answer is both 1 and 3 - if google rakes in money for what I've done (which they do) I should get the majority of that money. BUT since its beneficial for me to be seen (out and about or something) and since for most, atleast illustrators, allot of your art work is already on your portfolio site it is technicly free anyway. Anyone can save it and do fuck all with it - I might protest that they didn't ask first - but would that really stop people? Would I want to if they gave a mention?

Screw google though.

Also - Picasso is beyond ownership. At a certain point when an artist is basicly the center point of a revolution in modern art - his or her art belongs to all, not a museum, not his heirs. Its as common as tree's. Thats like trying to force people not to take photos of the east wing of the Louvre.

Shakespeare's gone, don't even think about him. - Kool Keith

Corporate America will not rest until every idea and every piece of art has been pinned down like a live butterfly, and no one can use or build on anything without *someone* getting paid for it. It's like buying up all the roads in the country and turning them all into tollways.

@8 and if someone doesn't make a noir detective story set in a mildly dystopian "liberterian" future where an important musician has just been killed - I will be jolly well cross!

@8, at this point in her career, having Madonna whacked is a bad thing because?

Picasso has been dead for forty years, and even his youngest child is over sixty, and fabulously wealthy. Pay whom, exactly? Why?